Use your own router with Bell Aliant FibreOP

Bell Aliant FibreOP internet is a popular choice among Atlantic Canadians. It’s one of the fastest providers in the country with no bandwidth limitations. However the equipment provided by Bell Aliant may not suit everyone’s needs and you may want to use your own personal router for more robust features such as guest networks, gaming priority, or you may want to place a router somewhere else for optimal signal without moving the equipment provided by Bell Aliant. If you’ve ever tried to attach a router to a Bell Aliant modem you may have quickly realized that you’ll end up with multiple internal networks as the Bell Aliant modem also acts as a router and wireless access point. It becomes convoluted if you require any port forwarding as the rules would have to be configured on both the Bell Aliant equipment as well as your router. To make matters worse, the wireless network broadcast by the Bell Aliant equipment could interfere with your personal router’s performance. There’s a better way to use your own personal router with Bell Aliant FibreOP internet.

Overview

The steps are basic. We’ll be accessing Bell Aliant’s equipment through an administration web interface and then we’ll disable the Wireless Access Point followed by enabling Advanced DMZ. This will allow your third-party router to obtain a pubic IP address without any interference from the Bell Aliant equipment. No firewalls, DHCP, Port Bridging, or vLAN configurations are required. This is simple and easy.

At the time of writing this Bell Aliant FibreOP is currently being re-branded to Bell Fibe. It’s possible that some of the steps below could change as new firmware is pushed to Bell Aliant’s equipment. It would be greatly appreciated if you could comment below should you notice any changes or issues with this port.

From this point forward I’ll refer to Bell Aliant’s modem/router combination equipment as the “modem” and your personal third-party router as simply the “router”.

What about my television receivers?

Your Bell Aliant FibreOP television receivers should remain connected to the Bell Aliant modem. There’s absolutely no need to connect IPTV receivers to your own router as it only adds overhead.

Prerequisites

The rest of this guide will assume you currently have a computer directly connected over Ethernet to the Bell Aliant modem.

Determine your modem’s IP address

Determining your modem’s IP address is easy. It will be exactly the same as your computers network connection’s gateway address.

Click Start and type “cmd” and hit the enter key.

At the command prompt type “ipconfig /all” and hit enter.

Document the “Default Gateway” address. This is the IP address we’ll use to access the modem’s web interface where we can make the necessary changes. I’ll refer to this as the modem’s IP address.

Connect and configure your own router

This portion of the guide is a bit vague as the instructions vary by device but here’s an overview.

Be sure your modem’s WAN interface is set to DHCP. This is the default configuration for nearly all North American routers but it’s worth mentioning.

Power cycle your router.

Keep your computer connected to the Bell Aliant modem for now…

How to enable Advanced DMZ (and disable the wireless radio)

The steps can vary by device. At the moment I only have instructions on how to enable Advanced DMZ on the R1000H and R3000. but I’ll have instructions for more devices as they become available. If you have a different modem model, I suggest trying the instructions anyway and let me know in the comments if you were successful or not. I would greatly appreciate it!

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